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Finally, for their study, they evaluated the data of 128,859 people from 9,778 teams in the USA over a period of four years, including information about the respective research area and career stage, and compared the names with 39,426 journal articles and 7,675 patents. They examined how many people in a team ever become authors and found that although women make up almost half of the workforce (48.25 percent), they only become study authors 34.85 percent of the time. Compared to the average of all team members, the probability of being named as an author in the article of one’s own research team is 13 percent lower, the chances decrease with increasing influence of the article (published in particularly prestigious journals, often cited). “At least part of the observed gender-specific difference in scientific output is therefore probably not due to differences in research contribution, but to differences in crediting,” the article says.
The power of women is often underestimated
In order to check the quality of their data and explore the causes, the researchers also sent out a questionnaire to 28,000 people. The results essentially confirmed the assumptions. Of the 2,660 researchers who responded, 43 percent of the women and 37.8 percent of the men reported having experienced not being named as a co-author in an article despite having contributed to the research. In most cases, they attributed their non-authorship to the fact that their colleagues underestimated their performance (women: 49 percent, men: 39 percent). Targeted discrimination was named as a possible reason by 15.5 percent of women and 7.7 percent of men. 37.7 percent of the men and 24.7 percent of the women stated that their research contribution was actually not sufficient for authorship. According to the results of the survey, however, women also had to do a little more to be mentioned as co-authors. Whether it was planning, analysis, writing the first draft or software programming – they ticked an average of 6.34 out of 14 possible fields, while men only ticked 6.11.
However, Lane and co also point out some important limitations; the data from the research teams examined may not be representative of the experiences of all researchers, as they almost exclusively used data from research-intensive universities. In addition, while the additional survey data collected came from a broad sample, it only came from one that focused on actual authorship, so they did not take into account the experiences of those who never became authors in the first place. And the response rate was low at just under 10 percent.
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